Better to organize it into main findings and side stories.

This is really surprising. Either because Firefox is not that popular ir mozilla has an automatic filter?

My theory was that if you are going to make something you will at least try to make something useful. The free extra toolbar, context or menu button will need some selling point.

So I did what every senseless person would do and started gathering lots and lots of "handy" programs and "tools". I install them one by one and then I try to use them as if I was entirely serious about it.

IMHO the important part of the process is to identify useless things early (and convincingly) and get rid of it.

Quite a lot of them looked like someone put some real work into it and they all got to stay. It took quite some effort to learn to use all of them the way intended but to my complete surprise some of them were actually useful.

Besides google toolbar the only one I remember by name is slickrun[0]. Out of all addons competing for search this one also launched applications and opened folders by typing the first letters of a configured keyword and had a hot key.

One truly fabulous tool was an extra windows toolbar button that folded out a context menu with a full blown web directory with 10 layers of nested sub menus. What made it fabulous was the sheer amount of effort someone (or multiple someones) made in organizing and curating thousands of websites into sub sub sub sub menus. Every time I thought (for laughs) I'd try find something there it not just was there but it lived in a very obvious place, surrounded by related stuff worth checking out.

I had 3 different spelling and autocomplete tools competing for the best suggestion. IEspel usually won as they send all text input to the server. Most shocking was that if you shifted your hands one character to the right it guessed flawlessly what you wanted to type even if non of the characters were correct. I loaded one with some popular phrases.

One of the text complete tools also competed with several clipboard history laboratories.

Without a license one could install limited Microsoft desktop buddies[2] but after installing many trial applications that had them I gathered a big team of different ones that were shared between applications. This is important because some tools offered screen reading that worked really well in any application. Being "serous" about the process I carefully configured everything which naturally resulted in configuring trillian reading irc out loud, each user with a different voice and a different desktop buddy. IRC had transformed into theater. I just let it run all day and repeatedly cried from laughter. I couldn't remember all the names but different voices are hard to forget.

The context menu of "every firefox extension" was nowhere near as terrible as mine. Mine had arrows to scroll and it kept going.

[1] - https://web.archive.org/web/20050211033123/https://www.bayde... (the image in the center at the top is the entire ui, one can drag it around and it floats on top of other windows)

[2] - https://the-microsoft-windows-xp.fandom.com/wiki/Rover

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=34819...

I had to recover somebody's bookmarks for them recently after it decided to destroy the main copy.